1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data systems in general, and an interface to provide filtered data from a data system in particular. In one embodiment, the interface facilitates voice access to a data system.
2. Background Information
Recently, the development of new technologies in the telephony and speech recognition areas has enabled data systems to be accessed via voice (e.g., spoken verbal input). Such voice-enabled data systems let users navigate to request a particular piece of data or a related set of data using voice commands, and then “reads back” the data to the user. These types of data systems are widely used in information systems in various industries, including banking, insurance, investments, etc.
In general, in order to provide voice access to a data system, a complete voice interface has to be developed from scratch. This typically involves integrating various hardware and software components, such as telephony interfaces, multi-channel access equipment, speech recognition software, text-to-speech (TTS) software and hardware, and other related components. In addition, a dedicated application must be written to interact with the various hardware and software components, and to provide interface and navigation facilities for voice access. This can be a very daunting task, requiring a team of IT professionals that are savvy in many specialized areas.
Several vendors now provide integrated voice-access systems that handle the voice-to-computer aspects of a voice-enabled data system. For example, these integrated systems handle telephony connectivity to a phone network, perform speech recognition to convert voice commands and verbalized data requests to a computer-readable form (e.g., ASCII text or binary text form), and handle the TTS functions.
Although these integrated voice-access systems provide a lot of the workload, they still require an application program to enable access to the data system. Typically, the application program is data-system specific, requiring specific navigation and database queries to be written. As a result, the inner-workings of the data system need to be known in detail.
In view of the foregoing, it would be advantageous to provide an “interface” that would enable data system vendors and third parties to easily integrate voice access to existing data systems by using an integrated voice-access system combined with an application program that is much simpler to implement and doesn't require all of the inner-workings of the data system to be known.
In addition to voice access systems, there are many other instances in which it would be advantageous to access selected data sets from within data systems. For example, many data systems provided integrated access interfaces, such as client user interfaces, to enable users to access data stored in the data system via a client computer connected to the data system via a computer network. Generally, these client user interfaces are provided by the data system vendor, and generally provide a limited, predetermined set of user interface objects, such as screens, lists and forms. In contrast, a third party vendor or business enterprise may desire to build a customized user interface for the data system. To facilitate such implementations, it would be advantageous to provide a mechanism to retrieve filtered data from data systems.